


As Its Remembrance Gives You Pleasure

by Jedi Buttercup (jedibuttercup)



Category: Total Recall (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Behavior, Identity Issues, Multi, Pre-Threesome, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000, Yuletide 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:28:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21843703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jedibuttercup/pseuds/Jedi%20Buttercup
Summary: Lori pulled back from the hatch, rapidly calculating how this latest twist affected her options. Offloading with Cohaagen's men was still, objectively, her safest choice. But if there was any other possibility, she'd be an idiot not to find out.
Relationships: Melina/Douglas Quaid | Carl Hauser/Lori Quaid
Comments: 5
Kudos: 17
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	As Its Remembrance Gives You Pleasure

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hecate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hecate/gifts).



> Titled from a Pride and Prejudice quote: "Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure." (In which Lori survives, and things are complicated.)

Lori stared up through the open escape hatch, the wind of the Fall's passage whipping her hair around her face, and wondered what the hell Hauser thought he was doing _now_. She could just see his heels disappearing up the ladderway above her, climbing toward the topmost level of the gravity train – but what could he possibly do up there while they were still in transit? Even in deceleration, the Fall was rising toward the surface faster than any aircraft could fly. And by the time they came into dock, Cohaagen's men would be waiting to stop him.

Those six weeks she'd spent playing wife for suspiciously average factory worker Douglas Quaid, she'd known that the man had to be a time bomb aimed at the Resistance. There was no other reason for the chancellor to hide a man of his obvious fitness and tenacity – those persistent dreams of his had been a warning from the very beginning – not only from the Resistance, but also from himself. Doug had been a trap that hadn't _known_ he was a trap, both for the Resistance and for her as well, whether by accident or design. The many years she'd spent undercover – after taking the identity of a teenage UFB student lost in the Colony on a gap year and leveraging that into a career in federal intel – had balanced on a knife's edge because the other side had decided to be clever. Lori hadn't been able to afford to help her temporary spouse, whoever he might be, at the risk of her own mission; all she could do was resolve to kill him when the time came, before he could fulfil whatever purpose Cohaagen intended him for.

Discovering just how competent he was after he cracked the seal on his memory had been equal parts frustrating and arousing; where the hell had Resistance agents like that been when _she_ had been finishing her training? Being informed of his original identity had come as an even greater shock; she'd been hearing the upper brass sing Carl Hauser's praises for years. Even if an agent of that calibre _had_ truly turned on the United Federation of Britain, that didn't make him any less a time bomb; it only increased the potential blast radius. And if he had been in on the scheme from the beginning, as she suspected?

Fuck her orders, and fuck his true allegiance. Lori had done her level best to stop her false husband from getting anywhere _near_ the Resistance leader, cloaking her determination under false zeal. Only to fail utterly, on every possible level. When Cohaagen had called her away from Matthias' hideout, leaving most of the Resistance's leadership dead behind them and Hauser in the process of being restored to his original identity, she'd been so furious she could have killed her supposed superior with her bare hands – if it would have done any good at all. The only thing she could think to do was to _keep_ pretending to be loyal long enough to get back to the Colony, to see if she could salvage anything at all from the rubble.

The absolute last thing she'd expected had been for Hauser to show up _again_ mid-transit on the Fall, still trying to free his Resistance girlfriend and – apparently – stop Cohaagen's invasion. Even though the bait that had led Matthias to accept him in the first place – a supposed kill code for the UFB's synthetic army – didn't actually exist. What did he think two fugitives were going to accomplish against fifty thousand armed robots?

Lori pulled back from the hatch and raised her phone implant to her ear, rapidly calculating how this latest twist affected her options. Offloading with Cohaagen's men was still, objectively, her safest choice. But if there was any other possibility, she'd be an idiot not to find out.

"They're headed topside," she announced breathlessly. "I'm going after them."

"What?" Cohaagen replied, sounding as baffled as she felt. "Lori, no. If they make it to the top, _I_ will deal with them. Just make sure those troops are activated and off-loaded the moment we arrive. Hauser is not stopping this invasion. Do you understand me?"

Still doubting her, was he? Well, she couldn't say he was wrong to do so. Though the confirmation that he thought Hauser still _could_ stop the invasion ... now, _that_ had been a mistake.

She pursed her lips, thinking about the four human soldiers in the passenger cabin with her; about the ranks and ranks of synthetics strapped down in other cabins throughout the Fall, poised to treat every citizen of the Colony as a hostile. Fortunately, she was the only one that had heard Cohaagen's order. She lowered her hand from her ear as it beeped to end the call, and turned to gesture imperiously at the soldiers.

"Check on the rest of the troops, make sure they didn't have time to sabotage them – the chancellor wants them activated and offloaded the moment we arrive. I'm going to follow the terrorists."

None of the UFB's regular troops were particularly inclined to take risks; these four no more so than the group she'd worked with back in the Colony. But before the men had time to do more than glance at one another, much less come up with a question that might prompt them to alert Cohaagen early, she turned back to the escape hatch and reached up to set her hand on the first rung. The structure wasn't built for comfortable traversal, any more than the inside of a building complex's elevator system, but she'd navigated one of those easily enough; surely this couldn't be any more difficult. She braced a boot on the lower lip of the hatch, then pulled herself up onto the side of the massive gravity-defying transport.

No one made it as far up the ranks as she had if they had issues with heights these days – the way the planet's remaining cities built upward rather than out, it was regarded as a career-crippling disability – but the impossible distance opening up beneath her feet and extending overhead still took Lori's breath away. The walls of the vast, planet-piercing tunnel rushed by at unimaginable speed, and even damped by the Fall's integrated shielding, the external pressure and gravity gradient shoved firmly against her with each upward pull of her arms. It was not hard to tell, out here, why Matthias' rallying cry had been _The Fall Enslaves Us All_ ; the scale of the thing was like the work of some vast god, rather than a mere mortal endeavour.

Ironic that the UFB could construct and operate a train that could go more than twelve and a half kilometres per second, not to mention survive the heat of the Earth's mantle and outer core, while dampening those elemental forces enough to protect the passengers from being rendered into crispy paste – and yet couldn't think up any other way around their population problem than to slaughter everyone they deemed inferior and take _their_ living space. The one thing they couldn't engineer their way out of, she supposed: human nature. 

Of course, she was one to talk. Give a spy a weapon, and every threat looked like a target. Instead of ... she didn't even know what to call him. A gift-wrapped opportunity?

A memory of Doug – no, Hauser – _unwrapped_ flitted briefly through Lori's mind: the texture of his bare, muscled back under her questing fingertips, the way he always fucked her more roughly after one of his nightmares, if she could get him to come back to bed. The way the lines around his mouth creased when he laughed. How much of that had really been _him_? What would have happened if she _had_ taken the risk, and tried to help him instead of kill him after the incident at Rekall?

Useless to speculate now. She shook her head, smiling bitterly, and kept climbing.

She had just reached the top, stepping onto the upper deck of the Fall, when she heard a single, deliberate gunshot crack through the air. Lori flinched at the sound, but kept moving, certain that Cohaagen still had more use for a live Hauser than a dead one. A high platform housing the locking structures and other equipment ringed a central, lower area marked with landing symbols for aircraft; from her position, she could see Melina at the edge of the upper platform, calling Hauser's name as a figure beyond her slid down a slanted surface toward Cohaagen and a waiting squad of soldiers. One of the men below lifted a rifle and fired again; Melina cried out in pain, then fell backward onto the upper deck, clutching at her arm.

Lori swore, thinking quickly. Cohaagen was the only one up there with the rank to give orders to the synthetics; the other humans were still dangerous, but if she could take the inhumanly strong machines out of the equation, they would – ironically enough – solve that problem for her. As long as they weren't fired upon directly, the artificial soldiers would view _her_ as their superior until ordered otherwise.

She drew her hold-out weapon from the small of her back, zeroed in on the little triangle of skin between the collar points at the base of Cohaagen's throat, and then pulled the trigger.

"What the – _Lori_?" she heard Doug gasp, and let out a breath of relief as she saw him sit up, pressing a hand to his shoulder.

"Later," she replied crisply, ignoring Cohaagen's choking collapse. "Stay down, you idiot!"

A loud, metallic groan drowned out her words as the Fall finished braking, rising out of the tunnel to dock in its vast tower above the Colony. Rain washed down over the deck as it shifted under everyone's feet, streaking her face like chilly tears; she caught her balance as the massive locks clanged into place, then shifted her aim to the next human soldier.

"All of you, stand down!" she yelled again. "Synthetics, secure anyone other than me still armed!"

There was a pause as the men aiming back at her glanced at their metal and plastic comrades in confusion. Then the synthetics moved, leaping toward the black-clad soldiers, riding them down to the deck one by one and grasping them hard until they dropped their weapons.

In the moment of shocked silence that followed, Lori could hear the faint clang of boots on metal approaching. She glanced over her shoulder to see the determined, angry face of Melina behind her, and smiled tightly at the other woman. Time for the dénouement, then. 

"Ah, there you are. Looks to be a blue-sky day, doesn't it?"

There had been very, very few actual blue-sky days since the last war; but as Matthias' lieutenant, Melina would have been educated in all the deep cover code words for just such a circumstance as this one. Her eyes went wide as she recognised them; she froze in place, then glanced over the edge at a very confused Hauser and a still-twitching Cohaagen, and jerked her gaze back to Lori in shock. 

" _You_?" she choked out. "How? _Why?_ You've been trying to kill us all day!"

"Me," Lori replied, still smirking. " _Please_ tell me you have an actual plan for how to stop this invasion, or I might just have to resume the effort."

"What? I – Hauser--" Melina sputtered, glancing back down toward her boyfriend.

Below, Lori saw Doug climbing carefully to his feet on the slick deck, warily eyeing the soldiers while he raised one wrist to eye level. A square digital screen glowed against his skin, the symbols too small against the dark surface for her to read at that distance but very, very familiar nonetheless. _Ah_. He'd planted explosives somewhere. Possibly quite a lot of them, if he'd scavenged them from the federal aircraft that had been left to ferry him and his guards back out of the No Zone.

"Bombs, sweetheart? You really shouldn't have," she called down to him. "How much time until they detonate?"

"You really think I'm going to tell _you_?" he called back, warily.

"I think you don't want to be here when they go off any more than I do," she replied, reasonably.

For added reassurance, she held her weapon out to the side and carefully lowered it toward the deck. "I think we can call a truce long enough to get to the explanations – ah, ah, remember what I said to the synthetics," she added in an aside as Melina twitched in her direction.

"Melina...?" Doug called up to them, brow furrowed in hesitation.

The other woman didn't look any more trusting than she had before, but she was at least thinking it through now. She was of a height with Lori, her hair a similar length and only a shade lighter; watching the emotions pass over her face was like being slapped with the description of everything Lori had been ordered to emulate during her six weeks as Mrs. Quaid. For the first time, she wondered if part of how swiftly Doug had fallen back into Melina's orbit hadn't been reverse transfer from his time with _her_ as much as it had been the other way round. They didn't really look enough alike to be sisters, but they _were_ similar enough that it was pretty clear Doug – no, Hauser – had a type.

There would definitely be room to manoeuvre there ... _if_ they all survived the next few moments.

"It's all right," Melina finally called back, then met Lori's gaze evenly. "After all, it's not like there's enough time to defuse them, is there?"

"Considering we have about twelve seconds...." he replied.

"Shit. Were you even expecting to survive this?" Lori sputtered, then shook her head. Of _course_ he hadn't been. "Take them inside and secure them!" she yelled to the synthetics still holding the soldiers in place, then gestured toward Doug. "Get your arse up here and ... _fuck_!"

Somewhere, down under their feet, the first of the charges went off. The entire structure shuddered, then jolted as a second explosion sent up a fountain of shrapnel and flame, damaging one of the vast locking mechanisms. Cohaagen's men cursed and struggled as the synthetics dragged them toward the nearest doors; Lori spared them no pity as she reached for the nearest support, which happened to be Melina's arm.

"Hauser!" Melina screamed, clutching back in return.

"Coming!" Doug staggered in their direction, reaching for one of the dropped weapons – then staggered again as the next charge went off, throwing him back from the staircase that led to their level.

Lori made an exasperated noise, then pushed Melina toward the nearest railing. "Get out of here; I'll get him!"

Melina took a step away, then hesitated, expression darkening. "If you hurt him...."

Lori rolled her eyes. "I have no more reason to – but explanations _later_ , move _now_!"

It was the right thing to do, of course; much as she hated to admit it, Melina was more necessary to the Resistance's next steps than she was. Lori's own information would be more important in the longer term. More critically from her own perspective, however, keeping her fate tied to Doug's would give Melina and the rest of the Resistance more incentive to keep her close now that Matthias and so many of the others who'd known her were gone.

Melina pressed her lips together, but finally nodded and jogged away, leaping from the edge of the Fall to a nearby balcony on the docking structure.

Lori stooped quickly to retrieve her weapon and tuck it away again, then hurried over to the stair and reached a hand down for her husband. He was wincing his way through the climb, wounded shoulder damp with more than just water; he balked briefly at the sight of her, but gamely shook it off and reached back, accepting the help. The next series of bombs went off as she pulled him up; another rolling red-black cloud rose from a second locking mechanism, and the entire upper deck of the Fall began to slope under their feet.

Lori glanced to where Melina waited, beckoning them toward her, then interlaced her fingers with Doug's and began to run, pulling him along in her wake. For a few alarming seconds, as the deck sped by under their bootheels at an ever steeper angle, she wondered if they'd left it too long after all – but then Doug's hand tightened on hers, and the shockwave of one last bomb chased them as they leapt from the topmost edge of the Fall.

The balcony grating was as slick with rain as everything else; Lori slipped to her knees as they landed, then clung hard with the fingers of her free hand as the entire structure shuddered around them. On the far side of Doug, she could hear Melina calling his other name; she looked up just in time to catch sight of the woman lunging for them as the final lock broke free and sent the gravity train back into tumbling freefall.

For long, endless moments, the three of them clung together as the world finished ending, gasping through the deafening noise and rising ash from the last of the explosions. Then cool air whipped the rain back against Lori's face, and she took a deep, cleansing breath, pulling herself back together. She carefully let go her hold, then climbed back to her feet and shook her wet hair out of her face.

"Damn," she said admiringly, looking back over the balcony at the chaos below them. Perhaps Carl Hauser's legend had been fairly earned, after all. "You really do know how to show a girl a good time, don't you."

Doug blinked at her, eyes wide, then broke into a rough laugh. "Yeah, well, I do my best," he replied dryly. "Now, uh. About that truce. What the hell is going on here?"

Lori glanced over his shoulder at Melina's pale, strained expression, and gave the woman a tight smile. "Do you want to tell him, or should I?" she asked.

"Melina?" Doug turned to look at her.

Melina pressed her lips together, then met Doug's gaze. "She gave me a code phrase," she said, tersely. "One of the deep-cover recognition codes Matthias set up for the agents he sent deep in the UFB government. We'd been working for years to get someone into Cohaagen's inner circle; but I never met most of them. Only Matthias knew who they all were."

That seemed to mean something to Doug; some of the tension went out of his shoulders, and he nodded. "Like I was – or Carl Hauser was – for Cohaagen."

Good. She wouldn't have to explain everything, then. They wouldn't have long before emergency personnel reached their level and they lost all chance for a private conversation for quite some time. "Yes."

"You believe her?" Melina interjected, furrowing her brow. "Just like that?"

Doug chuckled again, wearily. "No, just like _that_ ," he said, gesturing toward the empty space beyond the balcony. "Actually, it makes more sense than I'd like. You realise I was probably in on the whole thing, don't you? Whether I actually changed my mind about what the chancellor was planning – I had to have known the killcode was a fake. And I never warned you about it."

The way Melina's expression pinched ... yes, she'd put that together, at least enough to doubt. "No, Cohaagen said a double agent who didn't know he was a double agent...."

"By the time you took me to Matthias? Sure," he shrugged. "He wanted you to find me and dig up that virus, he just planned for it to happen later, after he'd had a chance to build a bigger army. But I told myself on my own recordings, the ones I left like breadcrumbs to get us there, that I _remembered having seen it_. And you can't layer false memories _over_ false memories. That's why I cracked at Rekall in the first place."

A bleak smile curled at the corner of his mouth as he turned back to Lori. "I was a threat to the Resistance from the moment you met me – and she knew it. Didn't you, Lori?"

His black tee shirt had been slicked to his skin by the rain, outlining every curve and cut of muscle; he looked like the statue of some action hero, slightly worn around the edges with soot, blood and bruises. Of course she'd known it. Under the surface gentleness and stifled longing, a predator had always lain sleeping. "Not the specifics. But the general shape of things, yes. Enough that I knew it was worth risking my cover to stop you."

"For a minute there, back in the No Zone, I wished you had," he replied, some of the old Doug warmth sparking briefly in his gaze. "Matthias and a whole lot of other people would still be alive."

"But then Cohaagen would still be planning his invasion, and he'd have found another way in," Lori reminded him. That wasn't in question. There was something else more important to know, while they still had this moment to themselves: whether the person he was now – who still seemed more Douglas Quaid than Carl Hauser – was the finished product, or if there were still more twists ahead. "Why _did_ you come back? It gave me the chance to finally break free, and I was glad to take it. But you were supposed to be down for a lot longer, recovering from the memory restoration. Did it not take?"

"Never quite got that far," he replied, shaking his head. "One of Cohaagen's team – guy named Hammond – cut one of the straps, and I got free. He was one of my contacts – Hauser's contacts – in getting back to the UFB, so he had to have been in on at least some of it. But maybe he thought it was real. Or maybe he was one of your Resistance moles, too. Anyway, I couldn't let Cohaagen get away with it. Not after everything."

His gaze sought out Melina's again, Adam's apple working as he reached for her hand – the one with the scar that matched his.

She hesitated, but reached back. "So the memories are gone for good," she said, voice pained.

He sighed, then turned their hands so the scars lined up. "I might not remember who I was. But I know who I am. I have Carl Hauser's skills, and his general knowledge. But the rest of me is still the guy who believed he spent his whole life living everything the Resistance was fighting for."

A wink of silver caught the light on his hand as the sky began to lighten overhead, and Lori realised, abruptly, that he was still wearing his wedding ring; that he had never taken it off.

She lifted her own hand, rubbing the place where the matching ring had rested for six weeks with her thumb. "So the woman who loves you, you don't remember; and the woman _you_ remember loving, was never really yours. I'd apologise for that – but I like you much better with your dangerous edges back on. Playing the comforting, supportive wife was the dullest six weeks of my life. Well... _mostly_."

He snorted at that, smile growing a little more genuine. "Don't worry. I'll adjust. I'm sorry, too, though," he added, glancing back at Melina. "If nothing else came up after Rekall cracked my memories – on some level, I must not have wanted it to. That isn't very fair to you. Either of you, really."

Lori thought again, rapidly, as the sky began to lighten. "Then how about you make it up to us?" she replied, stalking slowly back toward him.

"What do you mean?" he asked, frowning at her.

"I mean, Doug, _darling_ ," she replied, stopping close enough to skim her hands up over his chest. "That after all the raids, and what happened here – Melina is probably the highest ranking Resistance member left in the Colony. _You're_ the man who took down Cohaagen and his army. And _I'm_ the woman with the knowledge to get us out of this prison once and for all, before whomever takes over in the UFB comes back to finish the job. We're going to be working together quite a lot in the immediate future. So you're going to have _plenty_ of time to make it up to us."

She practically purred the last few words, pressing her body tight against his; she could feel his immediate response, and let her mouth curve in a smile as she let her gaze drift over his shoulder to meet Melina's. "And we'll have plenty of time to get to know _each other_ as well. We seem to have ... quite a bit in common, after all."

Melina's first response was indignation – but Lori saw her eyes widen as she caught the hint, and the swallow as she took another look at her boyfriend rubbing up against his wife, from the perspective of a potential _and_ rather than an _or_.

The other woman wasn't in her best looks; blood caked on one arm, rain and soot streaming from her hair, exhaustion drawing lines across her face. But she had one essential thing that this new Doug also had, that he'd inherited from Carl Hauser, which the old Doug had not: that backbone-deep fire that Lori had always sought, both in herself and in others. It wouldn't be a hardship to give it a try. Not given the potential benefits.

"Are you serious?" Melina asked – and there, in the hint of longing under the words, Lori thought she heard what had drawn Hauser to her in the first place. The part of him that genuinely, despite everything, had wanted to do the right thing.

Lori knew better, but she also knew how to work with that; and how to harness it to keep them moving forward. She stretched up the last few inches to nip at Doug's lower lip – then, when he let go of Melina at last to wrap his arms around her, slipped out of his reach to step behind him and raise a hand to Melina's face.

Melina's cheek was cool and damp under Lori's palm; Lori smirked at her, then leaned in to slant her mouth over the other woman's. She tasted of war: ash, blood, and something sharp like the crackle of ozone. But, after a brief, startled freeze, she also kissed back.

"Deadly," Lori replied, pulling back with a widening, wicked grin.

"You, uh, you were saying," Doug interjected, a new intensity simmering under the words. "About getting us out of this prison?"

Lori turned back to him, shrugging. "You didn't honestly think the _entire planet_ was still a No Zone, did you? Colony scientists have suspected for years that there are places out there where the natural weather patterns have already cleared much of the poison away – or where it was never that heavy to begin with. Pockets where rebuilding could begin. Matthias knew that if anyone had that information, Cohaagen would."

"And you found it?" he asked, gaping at her.

"A _real_ blue-sky zone?" Melina gasped, suddenly connecting it with her code phrase.

Lori reached into the neckline of her armour and pulled out a thumb-sized drive, showing it to them both. "As I said, I was glad to finally have the chance to break free. A shame that Matthias didn't live to see it – but we have the opportunity we need. _If_ we work together, before the UFB can regroup. The thing is, Cohaagen kept that information very, very close; he didn't want anyone getting ideas before he brought the Colony to heel. This is the _only copy_ of the reconnaissance maps; he destroyed the specialised drones that gathered them."

Doug glanced up at the still-dreary clouds, then grinned and pulled her back toward him.

"Now _that_ is a cause worth fighting for," he said, taking her mouth in a deep, fierce kiss. It lasted just long enough to make her count in her head how many days it had been since she'd last had him horizontal; then he pulled back and gave his girlfriend – theirs? – a questioning look. "Melina?"

Melina bit her lip briefly; then gave him a bright, growing smile. "The present is where we'll find our answer," she replied, quoting Matthias, then closed the circuit, fitting her mouth to his.

Far below them, faces under umbrellas clustered around the ruined Fall; sirens lit up the dawn cityscape, and on a nearby building, a giant Rekall advertisement flashed in vivid colours.

The past might be only a construct, according to the former Resistance leader; but from Lori's perspective, the future had never looked more bright.


End file.
